Lorena Hunt was scurrying this week to put the finishing touches on a mural at church and trying to figure out how to leave behind a large collection of her paintings before she moves to Arkansas later this month.
Hunt, a preacher’s wife turned minister, talked about her life-long commitment to serving God, as she painted two doves on the last mural for the children’s Sunday school rooms at Grace United Methodist Church.
She and a group of artists at the church have livened up the rooms with their paintings, and several have contributed other artwork to hang throughout the auxiliary rooms at Grace.
Painting is a hobby Hunt began to pursue during a later phase of her career.
“I lived with a professional painter in Enid, Oklahoma,” she said. “She inspired me to start painting. That was in the early 70’s. It’s been a long time.”
Prior to then, Hunt had been too busy to indulge much in leisure-time activities.
In high school at Russell, she had often wished she could become a minister or a missionary. She had been raised in a Christian family, she said, but a full understanding and commitment to Christ did not come until she was a young adult.
“I guess I was a senior in high school when I really became a Christian,” she said. “It was then I wanted to be a missionary. I had a cousin who was a missionary in India. ...
“At that time, they weren’t ordaining ministers in our church.”
She married Robert Hunt, a minister with the Evangelical United Brethren Church, and became a preacher’s wife.
“In those days, the preacher’s wife did an awful lot,” Hunt recalled.
She went with her husband as a missionary for three years in Bunumbu, Sierra Leone, in East Africa. He was in charge of managing finances and teaching at the college there and she supervised the students who were practice teaching.
Because Sierra Leone was an English colony then, elementary school children spent their first three “forms” learning the Mende language and the next three levels learning English, she said.
Hunt found the experience interesting and enjoyable.
“We ate rice every day and bunga (dried fish),” she said. “In our back yard, we had an avocado tree, grapefruit, orange, lemon trees. We raised pineapple and in our garden, of course, bananas.”
The previous occupants of their two-story home had installed an apparatus that provided running water up to a cement bathtub on the second-story. A modern toilet had not been installed, however, and only a latrine or bucket was available for other bathroom uses.
Sierra Leone, so named because the hills along the coastline seem to outline a sleeping lion, had two seasons: the dry season lasted about six months and the rainy season accounted for the other six months of the year.
“It was a very trying country,” she said. “It tried your health.”
Mosquitos were plentiful and flocked out at night, causing the couple to sleep under heavy netting to minimize bites. The netting didn’t always prevent disease.
“And, of course, I got malaria,” Hunt said.
When the couple came home, they reared two sons in Oklahoma and Texas before Robert became ill and eventually required round-the-clock care in a nursing center.
During that time back in the states, Hunt returned to college for a degree in theology, after attending seminaries in Connecticut and Colorado. She finished her degree at a seminary in Enid, Okla. At the time, she was director of Christian Education in a Wichita church and commuted to Enid for classes.
“I look back and think, ‘How did I do that?” she said.
She eventually took a job at the Calvary Church here before the merger of the Evangelical United Brethren and Methodist churches, subsequently creating the United Methodist Church.
Later, she was pastor of the United Methodist Church in Reading, where lived until she retired.
“I was 71 when I retired,” she said, adding that the church’s official position is mandatory retirement at the age of 70.
“But the Bishop said I could stay one more year and so I did,” Hunt said.
For the past 15 years, she has lived in semi-retirement in Emporia. She has filled the pulpit occasionally at Grace United Methodist, where she attends services, and has conducted funerals and weddings, helped out with communions and Sunday school classes, participated actively in United Methodist Women and the Joanna Circle of the United Methodist Women and, of course, has worked with the group creating the murals throughout the children’s areas. She also leads a Bible study class at Horizon Plaza and is in charge of church services there on Tuesday evenings.
Now, she is doing fewer of the ritual leadership roles and taking more time to relax and paint.
“In fact, I have so many paintings now I don’t know what to do with them,” she said.
Some may be sold to raise money for Grace, some will be left at the church itself, and the few remaining will make the trip to her new home in Arkansas.
Hunt’s sons have coaxed her into moving at the end of the month to be near son Randall Hunt, a family practitioner in Batesville, and his family. Her new apartment is only a few blocks from her son’s clinic. Two granddaughters and great-grandchildren also live within easy visiting distance.
Hunt has sold her car with the stipulation that she continues to drive it until she leaves.
“It’s going to be fun,” Hunt said of the move.
And when the Methodist bus isn’t running a convenient route time by her apartment and she really needs a ride, she’s worked out a solution: call her son.
“’Now you patients just wait,’” she said, imagining what Randall Hunt will say to his patients. “’I’ve got to take my mom to Wal-Mart.’”